the factories to the ports of embarkation, and he obtained the Army’s approval for an experimental convoy. On November 22, 1917, a trail-blazing party consisting of representatives of the Ohio Highway Department, the Army, the Lincoln Highway Association, and the OPRRE left Toledo enroute to the East Coast. The route they selected crossed Ohio via Toledo and Akron to East Palestine, where the Pennsylvania Highway Department picked it up, continuing on to Pittsburgh and across the Allegheny Mountains to Harrisburg, Lancaster, and Philadelphia. This became the main military truck route. Later, other truck routes were designated by Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland over the Old National Road, and by Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York via Cleveland, Erie, Buffalo, and Albany to New York City.
A caravan of trucks from Detroit headed for eastern seaports and the war.
In December the Quartermaster General announced that, in order to relieve the squeeze on railroad cars, the trucks would be driven overland to the Atlantic Coast under their own power.[1] The first Army truck convoy left Toledo early in December 1917, at the beginning of one of the most severe winters in recent U.S. history. Three weeks later, on January 3, 1918, 29 of the 30 vehicles that began the trip rolled into Baltimore.[2] This grueling trip was testimony to the durability of the war-model trucks and the endurance of the drivers, but most of all, to the superb maintenance efforts of the Pennsylvania Highway Department, which, as a result of careful preplanning, had kept the road open over the Alleghenies in the face of blizzards that left drifts 3 to 6 feet deep. In some places the crews worked around the clock to keep the road open. Teams and drags broke a track through the drifts, followed by horsedrawn road machines and homemade plows mounted on trucks.[3] Altogether, 7 trucks and plows, 22 road machines, 20 drags, 105 teams, 3 tractors, and 200 men were thrown into this massive and successful maintenance effort.[4]
McConnellsburg, Pa., and other similar towns and villages witnessed the industrial might of the Nation as caravans of trucks rolled through on the way “over there.”
Military vehicles were not the only ones to use the truck roads. Because they were kept free of snow throughout the winter, they attracted large numbers of private trucks and automobiles. In Ohio this traffic was particularly heavy:
With the congested condition of the railroads and their inability to promptly handle supplies that were needed in almost every community, it became necessary after opening up main arteries for travel to open up the lateral roads in order to reach the possible outlet to and from markets and villages. The amount of traffic these highways must sustain is apparent. The truck traffic was practically constant with all additional vehicles conceivable using many of the roads . . . Not only did truck and automobile traffic greatly increase, but burdens were placed upon them clearly in excess of what any ordinary road would be expected to carry. This great increase in traffic was, of necessity, confined largely to such roads as had been prepared by the removal of snow drifts, etc.[5]
In the months following the first convoy, the Army sent the remaining 30,000 trucks east via the truck routes, each loaded with 3 tons or more of spare parts and munitions. This operation released 17,250 railroad cars for other work, but the cost per ton-mile was high, even without considering the efforts of the States and counties to keep the roads open. From a historical viewpoint, the main accomplishment of the
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- ↑ Short Stretches vs. Through Routes, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 79, No. 25, Dec. 20, 1917, p. 1137.
- ↑ The First Motor Truck Convoy, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 80, No. 1, Jan. 3, 1918, p. 3.
- ↑ Pennsylvania Keeps Roads Open For Motor Truck Convoy, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 80, No. 9, Feb. 28, 1918, p. 408.
- ↑ G. Biles, Clearing Roads for Army Transport, Public Roads, Vol. 1, No. 1, May 1918, p. 13.
- ↑ C. Cowen, How Ohio Handles Important Roads Broken Down By Huge Traffic, Public Roads, Vol. 1, Nos. 6-8, Dec. 1918, p. 26.
